Nevertheless I was led through a couple of bare, unfurnished rooms into a sunny, perfectly adorable nursery. A nursemaid,--English, at a glance,--arose from her seat in the window and held a cautious finger to her lips. In the middle of a bed that would have accommodated an entire family, was the sleeping Rosemary--a tiny, rosy-cheeked, yellow haired atom bounded on four sides by yards of mattress. I stood over her timorously and stared. The Countess put one knee upon the mattress and, leaning far over, kissed a little paw. I blinked, like a confounded booby. Then we stole out of the room. "Isn't she adorable?" asked the Countess when we were at a safe distance. "They all are," I said grudgingly, "when they're asleep." "You are horrid!" "By the way," I said sternly, "how does that bedstead happen to be a yard or so lower than any other bed in this entire castle? All the rest of them are so high one has to get into them from a chair." "Oh," she said complacently, "it was too high for Blake to manage conveniently, so I had Rudolph saw the legs off short." One of my very finest antique bedsteads! But I didn't even groan. "You will let me stay on, won't you, Mr. Smart?" she said, when we were at the fireplace again. "I am really so helpless, you know." I offered her everything that the castle afforded in the way of loyalty and luxury. "And we'll have a telephone in the main hall before the end of a week," I concluded beamingly. Her face clouded. "Oh, I'd much rather have it in my hallway, if you don't mind. You see, I can't very well go downstairs every time I want to use the 'phone, and it will be a nuisance sending for me when I'm wanted." This was rather high-handed, I thought. "But if no one knows you're here, it seems to me you're not likely to be called." "You never can tell," she said mysteriously. I promised to put the instrument in her hall, and not to have an extension to my rooms for fear of creating suspicion. Also the electric bell system was to be put in just as she wanted it to be. And a lot of other things that do not seem to come to mind at this moment. I left in a daze at half-past three, to send Britton up with all the late novels and magazines, and a big box of my special cigarettes. CHAPTER VI I DISCUSS MATRIMONY Poopendyke and I tried to do a little work that evening, but neither of us seemed quite capable of concentration. We said "I beg pardon" to each other a dozen times or more, following mental lapses, and then gave it up. My ideas failed in consecutiveness, and when I did succeed in hitching two intelligent thoughts together he invariably destroyed the sequence by compelling me to repeat myself, with the result that I became irascible.